scream as a size eleven army surplus boot came down on his hand.
The scream peaked as Joe entered. No one was talking. Even the new generation of kids brought up in a sound environment which made the machine room Joe had worked in most of his adult life seem like a forest glade, couldn’t compete with this combination of frantic fans, stroppy stewards, and personal pain.
Then it was over. For a second there was a fragment of that rarest of things at the Glit, perfect silence.
In that moment Joe’s gaze met Galina Hacker’s across the crowded bar, and his heart sank. She’d been at the Oxfam shop again. At least the seventies flared trousersuit she wore covered those provocative legs (how could anything so skinny be so sexy?) but she’d given the tunic a bit of pazazz by cutting off the sleeves, and even from this distance Joe could see she was wearing nothing beneath it. The flesh missing off her legs had been redistributed up there with equally disturbing results.
First things first. He gestured to the bar and shouldered his way through, giving and returning greetings. Next best thing to anonymity for a PI was a place where everyone knew you, especially when it meant your pint of Guinness was already waiting, neat and welcoming as a vicar at a wedding.
‘Thanks, Eric,’ he said.
Eric, a young man whose habitually worried expression clashed strangely with the brash assertiveness of his diamanté-studded waistcoat, watched in respectful silence as Joe downed five inches, then said, ‘No Whitey?’
‘No. I’ve been rehearsing. He doesn’t care for Haydn.’
Whitey was his cat. No way you could get him into the chapel. Rev. Pot reckoned he’d got enough on his plate dealing with human crap. But St Monkey’s larger spaces had tempted Joe to bed Whitey down on a hassock in a remote pew at the first united rehearsal. He’d been all right through the introductory Chaos and the piano entry of the choir. But when they reached let there be light, and there was LIGHT, and the voices and instruments exploded in that most glorious of musical exultations, Whitey had shot upright and started a howling which had persisted long after the music had died away.
Most people had been amused. Aunt Mirabelle was not most people. According to her, Joe had let down himself, his family, Boyling Corner Chapel, and every decent Christian soul who’d ever had the misfortune to come in contact with him.
Memory of Mirabelle was so strong that when a hand grasped his arm he jumped guiltily and almost spilt some stout.
‘Thought you wasn’t coming,’ said Galina accusingly.
He turned and looked at her. Despite apparently being assaulted by a mad sheep-shearer and a myopic action painter, she was still a beautiful girl. But why not? Blacked out teeth and a raggedy suit hadn’t stopped Judy Garland of immortal memory from being the loveliest swell walking down the avenue.
‘Hello, Gal,’ he said. ‘Got a drink?’
For answer she held up a bottle. Joe winced. It wasn’t just the contents, winceable though they were, being something called Luger which the ads claimed ‘blows you away’. It was the way these young girls drank straight from the bottle that offended something deep down. When he’d mentioned this to his friend, Merv Golightly, his distaste had been submitted to a long and deeply unflattering sexual analysis. But so were most things that tugged at Merv’s consciousness, from Luton’s performance in the FA Cup to the way that John Major walked. As a taxi driver, Merv was used to a captive audience. An American visitor had once hired him to drive her to Leeds and back twice a week for a month. ‘It’s cheaper than my analyst,’ she said. ‘And it does me more good.’
‘Let’s sit down,’ said Galina.
She led him to a table where a bunch of her mates were protecting a couple of empty chairs by smashing their bottles down on any hand foolish enough to grasp them. They greeted Joe with their customary silent incredulity that one of his advanced years could still be moving with no apparent mechanical aid, then went back to their conversation which consisted of an interchange of staccato screams. The only alternative was to lean forward so that your lips were almost touching your interlocutor’s ear. This was the mode preferred by Joe and Galina, and if Aunt Mirabelle could have seen them in this position, the worst case scenarios hypothesized by her spies would have been positively confirmed.
A tape of the conversation would have been more puzzling.
‘You got anywhere yet?’ said Galina.
‘Give me time,’ said Joe.
‘It’s been a week.’
‘Six days,’ said Joe firmly. ‘I said it would need to be slow else you could end up getting what you’re trying to avoid.’
‘Yeah? Maybe publicity’s what we need, get it out in the open, make them show their hand.’
‘We’ve been through all this,’ said Joe gently. ‘If they’ve nothing to show, all you’re doing is giving the loonies a feast. There’s no such thing as good publicity. You see a headline saying: BISHOP NOT BONKING CURATE’S WIFE, it doesn’t stop rumours, it starts them. Get a hint of this in the papers, makes no matter how innocent they say your granddad is, there are enough loonies out there to give him and you and the whole family a really lousy time. Is that what you want?’
‘Of course it’s not,’ said the girl. ‘Only I hoped …’
Her voice tailed off, though he could still feel her breath warm on his ear lobe. He knew what she hoped. That in bringing her worries to him, she’d be told in no time flat that she had nothing to worry about. That’s what people often wanted, and they had a nasty habit of blaming him when he couldn’t give it to them.
She said, ‘He’s been round at the club again, asking questions. I got a proper description this time.’
She took a piece of paper from an inner pocket. It was warm from her breast. On it she’d scribbled: 5’8"–5’10" (bigger than me but not too much) reddish hair. Blue eyes. Swollen nose. Big feet. Olive-green jacket.
Joe said, ‘This sound the same as the one who got talking to your mum?’
‘Yeah, except she didn’t say anything about his nose. Maybe someone’s hit him since then. Gets in my range, it’ll be more than a swollen nose he ends up with!’
Joe regarded her gravely and said, ‘You’re not stupid enough to do that, are you, Gal?’
In fact, he knew she wasn’t stupid at all. And the more he talked to her, the brighter she seemed. He’d known her for a long time without really knowing her. She was a cashier at the Luton and Biggleswade Building Society where Joe stashed what little money he managed to save from his erratic income. She was pleasant and personable and always greeted him by name and passed the time of day as she updated his book.
He’d never seen her outside the building society except for one night he’d been invited to the Uke, the local Ukrainian Club, by a client and he’d spotted her sitting with a middle-aged couple and an older white-haired man. She’d given him a wave and he’d gone over and been introduced to her parents, George and Galina Hacker, and her grandfather, Taras Kovalko. Joe’s client had filled him in later. Taras was one of the numerous displaced persons who found refuge in the UK after the war. He’d settled in Manchester, married an English girl, had one daughter he called Galina after his own mother. She had married George Hacker,
